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Comment by brutusborn | Hacker News Reader

Fantastic website.

The history of nutrition claims seems to be full of failures (e.g. "butter is bad, substitute with margarine" -> "margarine is bad", "fat is bad" -> "carbs are bad"). From someone who is ignorant of Nutrition research I have always wondered if the main issue is that the best research is not communicated because it is not convenient for business or government. So although some researchers are aware that current advice is likely to be harmful, they don't have the power to change the messaging.

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Besides industry pushes, I think it's also due to the combination of bad incentives in academia/journalism.

1. This kind of research is difficult to execute because there are too many confounding variables. You can never get clear isolatable results. There is no such thing as "good" and "bad" that applies to a large population in all contexts. This may sound like a drawback, but in a way this is great for researchers because it creates an infinite amount of studies you can run and publish, and nobody can ever tell you that you're wrong, because there is no clear answer. You'll never be out of work. If industry tells you "we need a study that shows X" there's almost certainly a way to design a study in such a way to get result X.

2. Research must be published. No matter what your results or experimental assumptions and constraints are, as a researcher you must "sell" [0] your research and present it in the best light. That's what your career is all about. Citations. Similarly, as a reporter you must write articles that attract views, so you must sensationalize research, even if the original publication was clear about its shortcomings. These perverse incentives create vicious cycles, not just in nutrition.

[0] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

Industry interests typically win out over solicitude for the health and well-being of individual or collective humans.

There will always be a new fad "superfood" like pomegranate or acai berry, because there is some farmer's collective that needs to pump their crop into the headlines.

There will always be mass injection of bad stuff into the food chain, such as HFCS, because heavily subsidized crops produce an oversupply to be dumped. (Have you ever noticed that "corn" is never on lists of FDA allergens?)

There will always be hucksters and snake-oil salesmen (the bad kind; real snake oil is known to indigenous tribes to have healing properties). Dr. Oz and infomercials will need to push supplements and "the latest research" because they have a bill of goods to sell you.

My family was caught up in every fad diet throughout the 70s and 80s, and we suffered as a result. There was never any reason for us to eschew eggs and their yolks, or butter or full-fat milk. There were plenty of reasons for us to avoid drinking water with massive doses of fluoride. My father is a scientist who knows the environmental dangers of radiation, asbestos and other lab chemicals, yet he tacitly approved of the onslaught of crap which we routinely purchased from the corner grocery store.

The advice from my biology teacher in the 80s is still just as valid today (eat more fruits and vegetables and whole grains, eat less processed foods and sugar and saturated fats). See the recommendations from the AHA for example: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000001031

That consensus dietary recommendations change frequently is itself a myth.

Or best research is boring and does not make for good headlines, will not sell books or get you invited to conferences and TV to talk about it.

Even worse: fad diets and superstitions benefit certain companies (hint hint)

IMO observational studies with zero predictive power are the biggest problem. The vast majority of nutrition research that the media talks about is extremely low quality. Their conclusions depend entirely on which of many variables are controlled for.

Absolutely. Let alone salt and egg, which seem to be good or bad changing every 5 years or so :)

My favorite articles to see change on a regular basis:

* Eggs

* Chocolate

* Alcohol

* Wine (separate articles than alcohol)

* The "superfood" of the month.

* The "fat eraser" food of the month

* The "perfect diet" of the year

And the fact that somehow people don't seem to notice the constant trend and still take them all so seriously.

The problem is pretty clear - good data.

We need to run randomized clinical trials to tell if drugs work. We’d need the same to make any definitive conclusion about the impact of diet.

But the problem is unless say, cancer treatments, where an effect is obvious after months, the impact of diet can take decades to show up.

Can you run randomized clinical trials for decades? Not really.

So you do non-randomized, observational, retrospective studies that have so many holes in them you question the effort spent doing them.

That’s why we’re in the state we are.

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